1. Field
The present inventive concepts relate to management servers for assigning ranks to users and/or methods therefor which can be applied to a social networking service (SNS).
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, conventional membership management systems assign points and/or a rank to a user based on the amount of money the user has spent and rewards the user with a privilege (e.g., price discount of a service in accordance with the points and/or rank each time the user uses the service). In connection with such systems, a management device for managing a website is disclosed by Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2013-30159. According to this Japanese document, the management device compares the rank of a user who wants to utilize a service with the ranks of other users who have friend relationships with the user, and applies the highest rank to provide a privilege with which the user can utilize the service.
This management device for managing a website compares the rank of a user with the ranks of other users who have friend relationships with the user and applies the best rank to the user. In this technique, however, the real aspects of a friend relationship between users are not always reflected because it does not take into account what kind of relation connects the user of interest with the other user who has the best rank and has a friend relationship with him. For example, since a high rank is applied just by formally becoming a friend with a user, developing friend relationships in a true sense is not incentivized and/or activities of members may not be sufficiently encouraged.
In view of the foregoing drawbacks of the conventional membership management systems and/or methods, encouraging users to actively form friend relationships and/or incentivizing users to actively utilize services provided by an SNS and the like by assigning ranks to users in consideration of the users' friend relationships are desired.